New World Notes

The Future Still Waits...

... but not for much longer: post your Second Life predictions for 2008 by the end of January 1st.

Second Life as 2007 Google Trend: Slowing Locally, Growing Globally

Here's an interesting big picture point/counterpoint, gleaned from two parts of Google's world mind.  According to Google Trends, as a search term in 2007, Second Life reached a plateau point (much like the world's active user base) and is now slowly declining.  But Google's Zeitgeist metric tells another story: Second Life is one of 2007's fastest rising search terms among non-US Internet users.  (Along with two other virtual worlds, Webkinz and Club Penguin.)  The pessimistic interpretation is that the rest of the world is trailing a year behind the US, where mainstream interest in Second Life arguably peaked in 2006.  A more optimistic view is that international Internet users, as evidenced by countries like Holland, Japan and Brazil, are adopting Second Life more rapidly than their American counterparts.  What's your take?

Hat tip: e-Discovery Team.

New World Notes 2007 Roundup: Major Second Life Milestones for The Year That Was

By "milestones", I mean significant policy/personnel/technological/community changes, along with changes in outside perception.   Some are not necessarily major now, but may have deeper consequence in the coming year. As featured in New World Notes, they include:

January:  The Lindens open source the viewer.  I interview Cory Linden on the subject.

March: Second Life ranked among the top 500 of Wikipedia searches. (Last I checked, it had dropped to 925.)

May:
- Amid external and community controversy, the Lindens announce plans to introduce a 3rd party age verification system (now in Beta.)
- Sculpted prims introduced to the world, elevating the state of in-world building.  Resident-made tutorials emerge to help users learn to craft with them.
- WindLight atmospheric graphics introduced in First Look preview client.  Over successive months, Residents begin using it as their creative palette.

Rik's Top Ten Second Life Events of 2007

NWN Events maestro Rik Riel rounds up his favorite 2007 picks

These picks obviously reflect my own personal preferences and biases. But hopefully those of you planning events for next year can look to these for ideas on how to make your event as successful as possible. Looking back on the past twelve months of parties, classes, fund raisers, art openings, concerts and wacky Second Life happenings, I'm daunted by the task of picking my ten favorite events of 2007. So many cool events to choose from!  But somehow I have winnowed down my "bests" into nine categories: Art, Charity/Non-profit, Commemorative/Memorial, Conference/Convention, Cultural, Educational, Live Music, Multimedia, and Political Event.  They run the gamut from a massive relay race to chaotic collaborative art to a leftist blogger fest to alt-folk holodeck-enhanced concerts.

Please feel free to comment with your own faves in the Comments section! And now, without further ado, here are Rik's top ten event picks for 2007...

New World Newsfeed: Ex-Cory Linden Gets Academic (Updated)

... at least in part, according to his new blog "Collapsing Geography":

"[I'm] spending the spring as a visiting professor at USC Annenberg."  At the moment, Linden's former CTO, who recently left Second Life's corporate owner in a cloud of speculation, is "consulting, writing, and speaking about the economic and technological impact of virtual worlds; the interrelation between innovation and learning; and, the requirements of product development across geographically dispersed teams."  He also writes about the day he left the Lindens, and recaps the 2007 predictions he made last year.

Though it's not yet clear what he'll be specifically doing at USC, it's worth noting that Annenberg's Center on Public Diplomacy has an extensive Virtual Worlds Project run in collaboration with the US State Department, with recent initiatives on virtual world-driven philanthropy and understanding Islam through virtual worlds.  As for Cory, follow the future of SL's most influential Linden veteran at his blog.

Update, 12/31:  Cory offers more info on his latest teaching gig at USC: "The class I am teaching is part of the Charles Annenberg Weingarten Program on Online Communities, an intensive 1 year Master's Program that pulls together a gifted cohort of students and a great mix of professors."

The Future Awaits You

Your predictions for 2008, that is-- go here and post yours.  Hurry, the Open Forum closes at the end of Jan. 1st-- readers will begin voting on my favorites soon after.

What's the Trouble with Ten Percent? Tateru's Take (and Mine) on SL's Low Retention Rates

Over at Massively, erstwhile NWN contributor Tateru Nino has an in-depth look at that obstinately unbudging 10% retention rate, the number of people who try Second Life, and are still logging in three months after account creation.  It was that percentage when Philip Linden revealed it to Tateru in a New World Notes story last year, and despite a host of fixes and improvements, 90% of new users still leave.  Is that such a bad thing?  You'd think so, but Tateru makes this provocative aside: 

Whether that ten percent figure is actually good or bad depends on who you ask. Some people will tell you that that figure is actually very good (one MMO operator tells me that it is - but won't let me name them or give me their own figure), other pundits think it's terrible.

This got my gears spinning, because as it happens, we do know the retention rates of at least one other MMO: Habbo Hotel, which is partly comparable, because it's also free to try, and depends in large part on user-created content.  Last May, it had about 8 million active monthly users, making it the most popular MMO after World of Warcraft (and much more popular than WoW in North America/Europe, where Warcraft has only about 5 million subscribers.)  Impressive numbers-- even moreso, when you consider Habbo's equally low retention rate:

- Habbo launch date:                                        2000
- Active monthly users:                                     8 million as of May 2007
- Number of accounts created since launch:     80 million

Digeridoo Seeks A Thousand Heads

Aspen d’Grey just alerted me to the latest project from Lordfly Digeridoo, who once put himself through college partly by simply asking for L$ donations from random Residents.  Now he's got a different request that may be even more challenging: He's collecting a thousand screenshots of Residents.  That's far larger than the 70+ that Robbie Dingo culled for his latest machinima.  "I want to see (and show) how diverse your normal Joe Q. Avatar really is in Second Life," Lordfly explains. "But there’s no real proof of that."  Visit his blog if you'd like to offer your head as evidence.

Battlestar Galactica and the Business of Particle Effects

Second Effects is ArminasX Saiman's blog, and it's mainly devoted to his Second Life business, Electric Pixels.  That may seem dry, but it's a particle effects studio, which means he gets clients looking for a uniquely odd range of requests.  What do you do, for example, when a Battlestar Galactica roleplayer hires you in the hopes that you'll install a better afterburn effect into her Viper?  At first Saiman is stumped, until he comes up with a brilliant workaround.  (As long as the pilot keeps seated, that is.)  Read about it here.

Seraphine's Illustrated Eight

When it came to be my turn to reveal eight facts/and tag eight fellow SL bloggers, I tagged Seraphine Khorona of Encore Seraphine in hopes that she'd play along and reveal her own facts in her own unique way.  Seraphine, you see, creates blog posts (some reflecting on Second Life, some on her material world) composed of captioned SL screenshots, lovingly detailed to stylish and sexy effect.  Lucky us, she hasn't disappointed.